Culture Slut: Why Gloria Swanson is the Ultimate Gay Icon, Part 2
Words: Misha MN
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Last month I started talking about why Gloria Swanson is one of the greatest gay icons to have ever appeared on film. We got a good round up of her career, her place in the genesis of Hollywood and the context around her volcanic return to film in the 1950s, but her performance as Norma Desmond herself deserves a little more exploration. In this period of Hollywood, a star’s persona and the roles they played were often interwoven, one informing the other.
The idea of “disappearing into a role” didn’t gain popularity until much later, stars were their own archetypes; the femme fatale, the ingenue, the dragon lady, the Cinderella story. The biggest danger actresses faced was ageing, which the studio associated with declining box office figures. In the words of timeless chanteuse Elaine Stritch in Sondheim’s epic I’m Still Here “First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp, then someone’s mother, then you’re camp.” This observation is echoed by Goldie Hawn’s character in 1996’s First Wives Club; “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” Maiden, Mother, Crone, the eternal cycle, the myths and realities of the triple Goddess.
In Sunset Boulevard, Swanson’s performance made history; the film is often cited high up on the lists of the greatest movies of all time, but her appeal to queer audiences was also monumental. First of all, Swanson was already a camp figure, as almost all of the great silent stars are. The stylised nature of silent film performance, the conventions of the genre, its limits and quirks all provide an alternate and coded way of existing, something that was inherently understood by people forced to live in worlds that did not want them there. What are the secret hand signals and body language used in park bushes when cruising if not the ostentatious eye rolling and finger twirling of a soubrette in a musical comedy?
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Gender on screen was far more fluid, the artifice and decorative expression of self taking priority. Valentino, the sexiest man in existence at the time, was decidedly feminine, dark and capricious. His lesbian wife, Natacha Rambova, also a great actress, made costumes for Nazimova’s Salome, intended to be the first motion picture ever made entirely by homosexuals, male, female and gender transcendent. Greta Garbo, that untouchable pansexual goddess of suffering, took control of her love scenes, holding her lovers in her arms, filling the whole screen with her body rather than theirs. DeMille’s pet name for Swanson on set in the 20s was Young Fellow (and can be heard during his cameo in Sunset), make of that what you will.
In the film, Norma Desmond has created a unique world that she is the centre of, a place where she is allowed to be grand, to flourish, to live exactly as she chooses, hidden away from the harshness of mundane life, from boring social etiquettes that don’t serve her, from direct sunlight that shows her artifice, from her own increasing irrelevance. She created an underworld in which she was queen and this speaks directly to the queer community that had to do the exact same thing. There always have been, and always will be, the kind of queer people that cannot exist within the confines of a conservative heteropatriarchy and so they either live in secret or explode in front of the world. Quentin Crisp became famous because he could no longer be hidden in the London demi-monde, but all the girls and boys and fairies and queens he came up with still remained in their isolationist hideaways. Even today, one of TV’s greatest queer stars, RuPaul, had his periods of hiding, namely during the conservative Bush years, before returning to our screens to shake up the popularity of queer performance.
“Swanson was already a camp figure, as almost all of the great silent stars are. The stylised nature of silent film performance, the conventions of the genre, its limits and quirks all provide an alternate and coded way of existing.”
Queers already loved Norma Desmond for her glamour and her power, her queendom, but they also connected with the inherent tragedy of her life. She is a star on the decline, she is ageing, she is being forgotten. That’s all well and good for the grande dames of yesteryear, the only thing better than a new rising star and one that’s just about to spark out, but that’s not the real kicker. The true emotional gut punch is when Norma’s handsome young pet writer, who she believes belongs to her, deserts her for a younger woman. Norma, with her glamour and her affectations, her unique taste, her commanding presence, her experience and wild dreams and plans, is unceremoniously ditched for Betty. Betty with her youth and beauty, her normalness, her potential for a real future. Her naturalness. Norma, a performance of a woman, is left for Betty, a woman who is deemed to be whole. An unreal woman versus a real woman. If there is one experience that unites every queer and trans person that I have ever personally met, it is the experience of falling for a straight person who eventually leaves you for another straight cis person. A real girlfriend. A new boyfriend. A normal relationship, not whatever phase you were. Someone with a real future, in the daylight, not an isolated fantasist who can dream but will never really exist in the everyday world. Loneliness, the queer fear, rips through the body like the bullets Norma shoots her lover with when he leaves.
After the film, Swanson became embroiled in another famous cinema scandal; The 1951 Oscars Race. Those of you interested in Hollywood or Oscars history will already know that this is one of the most controversial nights in the history of the best actress category, and for good reason. First up we have Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, rightly so, then Eleanor Parker in Caged, a noir women-in-prison drama, Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, as a politician’s unrefined mistress who gets My Fair Ladied into a better life, Anne Baxter in All About Eve as the scheming titular character, and finally, Bette Davis, also in All About Eve.
It’s hard to talk about the history of Gay Icons without mentioning All About Eve. It is one of the most enduring Hollywood narratives, an ageing star being eclipsed by a rising one, and it is present in everything, from Busby Berkley’s 42nd Street, to Showgirls, to A Star Is Born, and Bette Davis plays the grandest of grande dames. Margo Channing is the blueprint for divas. As is Norma Desmond. If I had to pick the two most influential films from the 20th century for camp cinema, for queer tastes, it would be Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, closely followed by Whatever Happened To Baby Jane. This Best Actress race is so intense that it deserves it’s own essay, but essentially, neither Anne, not Bette won for All About Eve, presumably because they split the votes for that film, and Gloria didn’t get it either, probably because all the gays there were screaming for Bette Davis. In the end Judy Holliday walked away with the prize for a film which has definitely slipped out of the public consciousness whereas Margo Channing and Norma Desmond remain some of the most quoted characters of all time.
Gloria Swanson and Norma Desmond will always be synonymous with each other, no matter what happens. Recently, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s tawdry musical adaptation has returned to the West End with Nicole Scherzinger, and rumours of a cinematic adaptation of said musical starring Glenn Close has been swirling for nearly a decade at this point, but nothing will ever top the impact of the original. Queerness is connected by a curated history of culture that touches the fringes of society, mixing nostalgia, gossip, legend and tragedy. In an age where stars are a dime a dozen and everyone gets their fifteen minutes, how do we find the real magic buried in plain sight? If someone has to say “this for the gays!”, is it really, or is it just another smart internet capitalist quip? Queerness chooses its own icons, and it’s the ones that speak to us beyond the void, any void, be it time, mortality, location, race, experience or language, that truly mean something. Any pop star can be iconic, but only Icons can recreate who we understand ourselves to be.